Posts tagged storage services
Cloud Computing Delivering on its Promise, but Doubts Still Hold Back Adoption
Jul 22nd
The Majority of IT Departments now Use Cloud-Based Applications, with Users Reporting Better Security and Lower Costs
Waltham, Mass., July 22, 2010 – Mimecast®, a leading supplier of cloud-based email security, continuity, policy control and archiving, today announced the results of the second annual Mimecast Cloud Adoption Survey, an annual research report examining attitudes to cloud computing services amongst IT decision-makers in UK and US businesses. The survey, conducted by independent research firm Loudhouse, reveals that a majority of organizations (51 percent) are now using some form of cloud computing service—and the levels of satisfaction amongst those companies is high across the board. Conversely, companies not yet using cloud services cite concerns around cost and security.
The survey shows that of those businesses using cloud services, 74 percent say that the cloud has alleviated internal resource pressures, 72 percent report an improved end-user experience, 73 percent have managed to reduce their infrastructure costs and 57 percent of say that the cloud has resulted in improved security. However, not everyone is convinced: 74 percent of IT departments still believe that there is always a trade-off between cost and IT security and 62 percent say that storing data on servers outside of the business is always a risk.
Highlights from the Research
Cloud Services are now the Norm:
- The majority of organizations now use cloud-based services. The report found that 51 percent of organizations are now using at least one cloud-based application. Adoption rates amongst US businesses are slightly ahead of those in the UK with 56 percent of respondents using at least one cloud-based application, compared to 50 percent in the UK. This is a significant rise from the 2009 survey, when just 36 percent of US businesses were using cloud services.
- Two thirds of businesses are considering adopting cloud computing. Encouragingly for vendors, 66 percent are now considering adopting cloud-based applications in the future. Again, US businesses are ahead of the UK in their attitudes to the cloud with 70 percent considering cloud services, compared to 60 percent in the UK.
- Email, security and storage are the most popular cloud services. 62 percent of the organizations that use cloud computing are using a cloud-based email application. Security and storage are the next most popular, used by 52 percent and 50 percent of organizations with at least one cloud-based service respectively. Email services are most popular with mid-size businesses (250-1,000 employees), with 70 percent of these organizations using the cloud to support this function. Smaller businesses (under 250 employees) are most likely to use the cloud for security services, with larger enterprises (over 1,000 employees) most likely to make use of cloud storage services.
Cloud Attitudes are Split Between the ‘Haves’ and ‘Have-Nots’:
- Existing cloud users are satisfied. Security is not considered to be an issue by existing cloud users: 57 percent say that moving data to the cloud has resulted in better security, with 58 percent saying it has given them better control of their data. Among current cloud users, 73 percent say it has reduced the cost of their IT infrastructure and 74 percent say it has alleviated the internal resource pressures upon the department.
- Security fears are still a barrier. Three quarters (74 percent) of IT departments agreed with the statement ‘there is always a trade-off between cost and IT security,’ suggesting that many organizations feel cloud solutions are less secure than more expensive on-premise alternatives, simply due to their lesser cost. Storing data on servers outside of the business was also seen as a significant security risk by 62 percent.
- IT is concerned that adopting cloud will not initially result in cost savings. 58 percent of respondents thought that replacing legacy IT solutions will almost always cost more than the benefits of new IT.
- Cloud concerns stem from a lack of clarity. One reason for the negative perceptions of cloud services among non-users seems to be a lack of clear communication from the industry itself. 54 percent of respondents said the potential benefits of cloud delivery models are overstated by the IT industry.
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Mezeo Software Announces Partnership With CTERA Networks at HostingCon 2010
Jul 20th
CTERA Networks’ Mezeo Ready Appliances Enable Affordable Hybrid Cloud/On-Premises Storage, Sharing and Backup for Mid-Size Organizations
AUSTIN, TX–(Marketwire – July 20, 2010) – Mezeo Software™ (www.mezeo.com), the leading provider of a deployable cloud storage platform for service providers, today announced the addition of CTERA™ Networks (www.ctera.com) as a Mezeo Ready Solution Partner. The announcement was made at HostingCon 2010, which runs through July 21 at the Austin Convention Center. Mezeo is exhibiting in Booth 337.
Mezeo Ready service providers can now extend their cloud offerings with CTERA’s Cloud Attached Storage solution, which uses customer premises appliances as cloud gateways for backup and remote access services managed via the CTERA Portal. The CTERA CloudPlug™, ideal for single office, home office and branch locations, is a small plug computing device that transforms any USB or eSATA hard drive into network-attached storage (NAS) with integrated online backup. As a Mezeo Ready solution, the CTERA CloudPlug and CTERA’s larger 2-bay appliance, the CTERA C200, seamlessly connect a user’s local network to Mezeo-based storage clouds for secure remote file sharing, synchronization and remote access.
“The growing virtual workforce and the constant need for service providers to deliver value-added services to users have put secure remote file access, storage and backup capabilities on center stage,” said Steve Lesem, President and CEO of Mezeo Software. “CTERA delivers much needed reliability and storage flexibility to the SMB market via elegant and easy-to-install appliances, making them an ideal Mezeo Ready partner.”
The event exhibits open on Tuesday, July 20, and attendees can stop by Mezeo booth 337 to see a demonstration of the CTERA CloudPlug.
“CTERA has designed its technology to cater to the operational needs of service providers while supporting a heterogeneous cloud infrastructure, so we are excited to team with Mezeo Software, who is also a leader in this space,” said Liran Eshel, CEO of CTERA Networks. ”The CTERA and Mezeo solution provides mid-market-focused service providers a seamless and affordable cloud storage solution for their customers.”
Launched in June, the Mezeo Ready Program is designed to make it easier for customers and service providers to find and deploy Mezeo Ready solutions. The Mezeo Ready community is comprised of a wide-range of service providers, developers, cloud gateway providers and technology partners all focused on delivering Mezeo enabled cloud storage solutions.
With Mezeo, IT Service Providers can rapidly monetize Storage as a Service with a branded offering, and large enterprises can implement a secure, private cloud with clients for BlackBerry,® iPhone, Windows desktop and the Web. Mezeo features end-to-end encryption, advanced file sharing and collaboration, content tagging and access anywhere with white label Web 2.0, Windows® desktop, and iPhone and BlackBerry® native clients. Mezeo is easy to deploy, multi-tenant, and highly scalable and secure, with REST Web Services APIs for platform extensibility.
Follow Mezeo on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mezeo.
To sign up for the monthly Cloud Storage Strategy newsletter and download the Cloud Storage Business Model Toolkit, go to www.cloudstoragestrategy.com/model.
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The Many Benefits of Cloud Computing
Jun 10th
Cloud computing brings benefits across three categories: economic, architectural, and strategic. First, it helps reduce IT costs and shift budgets from CAPEX to OPEX. Second, it improves the experience of end-users. Third, it helps companies focus on their core competencies.
Utility Pricing
Cloud Computing is first a foremost defined by its utility-based pricing model. Users of the platform consume computing and storage services on demand and pay for them as they go, using an Operating Expenses (OPEX) budget, instead of paying for infrastructure resources up-front using Capital Expenditures (CAPEX). For example, a Director of Sales can create user accounts for 10 of her sales people on some on-demand CRM application by using her corporate credit card, without having to ask the CFO for a budget, and without having the IT Department initiate a requisition process for a new server.
Elastic Resource Capacity
Cloud Computing differs from more traditional forms of distributed computing in the way it scales computing and storage resources up and down. Instead of tapping from a fixed set of resources, users can add or remove capacity at will, almost instantaneously, and only pay for what they actually use. While utility pricing let users pay as they go, elastic resource capacity let them pay as they grow (or shrink). Following our previous example, the Director of Sales can add 5 more accounts for the sales people that were recently added to her team following the merger with another company, without having to worry about adding new servers or buying more hard drives.
Virtualized Resources
Cloud Computing would not be possible without virtualization, not for arcane technical reasons, but for one obvious business requirement: the need for multi-tenancy. In order to benefit from economies of scale, cloud computing is predicated upon the sharing of a common infrastructure by multiple groups of users, often referred to as tenants. And multi-tenancy can only be achieved through some kind of virtualization, either at the database level (Salesforce.com), application server level (Google AppEngine), kernel level (Red Hat), or CPU level (Amazon EC2). Unlike grid computing, which often pooled and aggregated distributed computing resources for the purpose of handling very large computing jobs that could not fit or would take too long to complete on a single server, Cloud Computing creates virtual slices of resources from clusters of servers and storage devices, perfectly sized to fit the specific needs of multiple users. Such virtual resources can be small or large, and scale elastically as user needs evolve over time. In our previous example, virtualization means that the CRM application used by our sales team is served by an infrastructure also used by many other tenants, all securely isolated from each other.
Management Automation
Cloud Computing platforms differ from traditional corporate data-centers in one major way: standardization. While your typical data-center will usually host every versions of every operating systems and databases known to man, thereby creating massive management overhead, most Cloud Computing platforms usually standardize on a single kind of CPU (x86-based predominantly), a single hypervisor (VMware, Xen, etc.), a single operating system (some Linux distribution usually), and a single database (MySQL is the dominant player there). This standardization has an obvious business benefit: dramatic reduction of operating costs through aggressive management automation. Following our previous example, the sales team’s CRM application is served by a single infrastructure managed by a team that is orders of magnitude smaller than the aggregated team that would be required to manage the systems used by all tenants if every one of them were to use their own infrastructure.
Self-service Provisioning
Cloud Computing and Software as a Service are often compared to the Application Service Provider (ASP) model that became popular for a brief period of time in the late 90′s. One element makes them fundamentally different from each other though: self-service provisioning. With the ASP model, dedicated servers had to be provisioned for every customer, which meant that technical resources had to be involved every time a new customer would be signed. Hefty setup fees would be added to the bill, and the service would become operational within a few days at best. With Cloud Computing, business end-users like our Director of Sales can provision applications and user accounts in a few mouse clicks, and these become available instantly.
Third-party Ownership
Cloud Computing is also a new form of outsourcing. Customers trying to focus the allocation of scarce capital resources to their core businesses soon realize the benefits of moving IT infrastructure off their balance sheet. Furthermore, as technology evolves and leading service providers roll-out ever larger data-centers, the acquisition and operation of state-of-the-art data-center facilities makes less and less sense from an economic standpoint for most organizations. Cloud Computing is all about the transfer of ownership for such resources to a third-party that specializes in their deployment. According to our previous example, the company using the CRM application managed by some service provider does not own any infrastructure beyond a few laptop computers. Everything else, from data-centers to servers and storage systems is owned and operated by the service provider.
Managed Operations
Cloud Computing is finally about allocating human resources to tasks that will directly impact the business, rather than simply managing the infrastructure that supports it. As such, Cloud Computing advocates a model according to which the IT infrastructure is not only owned by a third-party, but managed by the third-party as well. Software upgrades, data backups, and the countless other tasks required to manage mission-critical business applications on a day to day basis become the responsibility of a third-party, according to well-defined Service Level Agreements. Following our example, the Director of Sales discovered this morning the umbrella adorned logo for the Summer 2010 version of her favorite CRM application, without having taken any part in the software upgrade process that happened over the weekend. In the cloud, ignorance is bliss.
Article Contribution to CloudTweaks.com by: Ismael Chang Ghalimi
About Ismael
Ismael Ghalimi is a passionate entrepreneur and fervent industry observer, founder and CEO of Intalio.
More information on Ismael can be found at: Intalio
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Scenios puts video collaboration in the cloud – Cloud Video
May 17th
Scenios is a new video host launching Monday that hopes to find the sweet spot between traditional storage services and high-end digital asset management software. In many ways it’s not so different from the former, except that it’s entirely dedicated to video files and the collaborative video-creation process.
To get files onto the service, users need to upload from their browser. There is no desktop or mobile component yet, though Scenios CEO Mark Davis, whom CNET chatted with last week, says a piece of desktop software is on the way. It will sync up local files with their cloud versions, as well as let users transcode to another format before uploading.
The uploader takes files up to 5GB in size, and uses Java. In my early testing with it, this proved to be painfully slow. A 74MB test file took close to nine minutes to upload, compared to storage services Box.net and DropBox, which did it in a little more than a minute. (The CNET offices have a mighty fast connection.) I had slightly better results trying a larger file on a different computer with the same connection, getting a 702MB AVI file to go up in 23 minutes. For pro users who might be pushing that 5GB cap, these times don’t really cut it, so I’m hoping this improves.
Where Scenios differs from other typical storage providers is what you can do with the file once it’s there. Hovering over the thumbnail of a clip in your library, you get a watchable preview of it–complete with sound. Clicking on it takes you to an HTML5 player that’s running an H.264 version of that clip with a timeline and keyframes every 10 seconds.
Scenios’ video view gives you a quick keyframe every 10 seconds, a way to tag your videos, and tools for exporting and re-encoding.
(Credit: Screenshot by Josh Lowensohn / CNET)
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Novatel unveils MiFi mobile storage – Mobile Cloud Computing
Mar 25th
NETWORKING TECHNOLOGY VENDOR Novatel unveiled a cloud based mobile storage solution called Novadrive at CITA Wireless 2010 today.
Novadrive is powered by Nomadesk MiFi technology, offers 256-bit encryption and can be remotely accessed to wipe data if it’s lost or stolen. Novatel claim its mobile storage device offers intelligent mobile hotspots for punters and will do all the things you’d expect mobile storage to do like share, encrypt, synchronise, backup and store files to access from any laptop or web-based, hand-held mobile device.
MiFi has been a hot topic at CITA this year. Novadrive one of the first ‘intelligent’ devices to feature this mobile broadband category. Novatel believes that its hardware is different from existing router hardware because it doesn’t need an external broadband USB modem to work.
The Novadrive should offer better access to data from any location with extra security and as much storage as you can shake a stick at. Novatel’s current customers can get a free downloadable Novadrive account with limited functionality or you can sign up for £33 a year for a personal file server with unlimited capacity. You can also sign up for approximately £10 a month to get a business file server.
“This offering will provide our existing MiFi community and other potential MiFi users, with premier cloud storage services seen in the market today,” said Rob Hadley, Novatel’s chief marketing officer. Full Source
“We are very happy to bring to market a cloud-based solution with unlimited storage capacity, 256-bit encryption, and added security service to store and share photos, videos, presentations and documents through any mobile device. We look forward to expanding this offering quickly to support the MiFi local storage which allows seamless access and synchronization to the SD removable storage on MiFi to and from the cloud.” Full Source
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7 Ways to Beat the Glut of Cloud APIs – Cloud Computing
Mar 18th
Cloud computing is big right now, but the sheer number of options, and the lack of interoperability, can be an issue for developers. Vendor lock-in reduces the options available to those working on cloud computing initiatives, while the variability between APIs inevitably leads to many hours spent pouring over documentation when comparing cloud service providers.
There are a number of projects that can reduce, or even eliminate, some of these problems by exposing the functionality of a number of cloud service providers through a consistent interface. Here is a list of 7 such projects.
- DeltaCloud is a RehHat initiative that provides a REST API and user tools to manage EC2, RHEV-M, RackSpace and RimuHosting, with VMWare ESX and more coming soon.
- libcloud is a pure python client library for interacting with many of the popular cloud server providers. The libcloud web pages lists support for 11 cloud services provides.
- The Simple Cloud API brings cloud technologies to PHP and the PHPilosophy to the cloud, starting with common interfaces for File Storage Services, Document Storage Services and Simple Queue Services. The API page shows support for Amazon S3, Windows Azure Blob Storage and Nirvanix, with more to come.
- jclouds is an open source framework that helps you get started in the cloud and reuse your java development skills. Jclouds support many clouds including Amazon, VMWare, Azure, and Rackspace.
- The Dasein Cloud API provides an abstraction for applications that wish to be written independent of the clouds they are controlling.
- OpenNebula is an open and flexible tool that fits into existing data center environments to build any type of Cloud deployment. OpenNebula 1.4 supports Xen, KVM and VMware virtualization platforms and on-demand access to Amazon EC2 and ElasticHosts Cloud providers. It also features new local and Cloud interfaces, such as libvirt, EC2 Query API and OGC OCCI API.
- Cloudloop is a new open source Java API and command-line management tool for cloud storage. Unfortunately the cloudloop web site was hacked recently, but you can find more information with this post on TheServerSide.
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‘Cloud Computing’: What Exactly Is It, Anyway?
Feb 8th
For a lot of small-business owners, “cloud computing” is the latest IT buzzword to leave them scratching their heads. To demystify things, here’s a primer for companies looking to wade into cloud services for the first time.
What are cloud services?
The Journal Report
See the complete Small Business report .
Broadly speaking, any service or program sent over an Internet connection can be considered a cloud service. An outside vendor runs the servers and software, so the buyer doesn’t have to worry about the technical issues in-house—and can focus on its own business.
The services come in a number of forms. Many businesses are already familiar with one aspect of cloud computing: software delivered over the Web. Along with email services like Google Inc.’s Gmail, there are programs that help salespeople keep track of customer information, such as Salesforce.com Inc.’s software, and backup data-storage services from providers such as Amazon.com Inc.
Some businesses don’t just use software services, they buy computing power from vendors such as Verizon Communications Inc.—much like buying power from a utility. Let’s say a retailer expects lots of additional business during the holidays, and its in-house servers can’t handle the load of customer orders. The company might pay a vendor for the use of its servers, to shoulder part of the computing work as the need arises.
Other companies, meanwhile, might buy computing power on a regular basis. They might drop one or more in-house servers entirely—or not buy the hardware in the first place—and let a vendor run their vital programs on its machines. Once again, the buyer would pay a fee based on how much computing power it used.
How much will they cost?
Unlike traditional applications, which require hardware such as servers and IT staff for maintenance, cloud services don’t carry many upfront costs.
A Cloudy Outlook
- About 3.2% of U.S. small businesses, or about 230,000 businesses, use cloud services.
- Another 3.6%, or 260,000, plan to add cloud services in the next 12 months.
- Small-business spending on cloud services will increase by 36.2% in 2010 over a year ago, to $2.4 billion from $1.7 billion.
Source: IDC
Consider software. Salesforce.com’s offering for businesses costs between $5 and $25 per user each month. Google offers a host of programs including email, a word processor, video and a hosted Web site for an annual fee of $50 per user. For small businesses that have more-extensive computing needs, such as drug laboratories with extensive software, cloud services could cost more than $1,000 a month.
As for buying computing power, some providers charge for a certain amount of memory and computing configuration. Terremark Worldwide Inc., for example, charges six cents an hour for one gigabyte of RAM and the equivalent of one processor.
One caveat that might bump up costs a bit: If you’re going to rely on the Internet for your services, you will need a solid connection. While some believe a business-class DSL connection is sufficient, many industry observers and consultants recommend getting a faster line, such as a T1.
Continue Reading at WSJ
